A thousand country songs attempt to depict what life is like growing up in rural America, but most are wildly unsuccessful. For the last 10-15 years, popular country music has become the genre of choice, not for actual country people, but for white, middle class suburbia. The reason that most country songs fail so miserably…

Yesterday, I slowly, carefully clicked through TIME Magazine’s Top 100 Photos of 2015 (http://time.com/4124895/top-100-photos-of-2015/).  Some of the photos were joyous and beautiful: the United States Women’s soccer team celebrating a big goal, a beluga whale spraying water at smiling Japanese children, and tulip fields blooming in the Netherlands. But many more of the photos were…